This is the first in an ongoing ad-hoc series of posts on Apache Kafka performance. I have no general direction, I’ll just share interesting insights based on the performance testing I do on Apache Kafka. Recently I was curious to see if there was any general performance improvement since Kafka 3.X. So I ran a suite of benchmarks with Dimster against 3.7.2 and 4.3.0. I saw two common patterns: Pattern 1: Low load benchmarks showed that end-to-end latency was higher with Kafka 4.3 compared t...

Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it. If I don’t learn anything new while I’m writing, it’s not interesting enough to publish. Typically I learn way more than two things. For instance, in my o3 geoguessr post, I started out with the idea that most AI prompts probably don’t work, and I ended up learning that newer OpenAI models have lost o3’s ability to ge...

This project exists because I bought 30 sticks of 16GB DDR4-3200 RDIMM for an EPYC build in early April: an r/homelabsales find at $80 a stick, which was a fair price that day. The problem is that “that day” turned out to be the exact top of the market. Buying the top is pretty standard for me. Then the server wouldn’t POST with at least 4 of the sticks installed, and of the 16 that made it in, 4 more start throwing ECC errors the moment I do anything memory-heavy (LLM inferencing, which i...

Welcome to a linked rundown of global developments in the exploration of our Moon across the first half of 2026. There’s also a section on global outlook because we must not forget our interconnectedness and collective action needs over sovereign interests. Each linked article below explains and contextualizes said development. As usual, I make a conscious effort to curate events and trends that actually happened instead of amplifying speculative coverage of upcoming events that may or may n...

As I write, I hear the keys on my keyboard pressing down – the sounds are fast, rhythmic, comforting. I hear the whirr of a hard drive in the background, and the occasional car walk past. Every so often, bird song comes into the foreground; I hear the calls of birds in the distance now. I hear my breath as I breathe in and out. I take a deep breath. I keep writing. This week I wrote down a question in my notes: what does a blog post sound like? I reasoned that there are two perspectives from w...

In 1914 the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation, investigated the possibilities of developing the Columbia River. Thousands of arid but potentially fertile acres needed only water to become the Imperial Valley of the Northwest. Locked in the mountain ranges were valuable ores awaiting electricity to turn them into needed metals. Two years later the State engineer of Oregon urged the development of the Bonneville site as a national-defense measure: he saw in the propos...

About two years ago, I got into film photography. More accurately, I got back into film photography, having grown up in a world before digital became mainstream. I have scattered memories of taking disposable cameras with me on school trips, with mixed results, and later borrowing my dad’s Lomo Smena 8M for a while until the winder jammed. In my teen years, as digital became more widespread, I got a lot of use out of my dad’s digital point-and-shoot, spending hours upon hours making stop...

Something dawned on me when researching EV trade offs: while more efficient on fuel than gasoline cars, batteries work best between 60-80F (15.6-26.7C), and experience degraded performance below 40F/4.5C or above 85F/29.5C. You know what else works best between 40F and 90F? Me on my motorcycle or ebike. The best times to use an EV also happen to be the times I’d enjoy being on two wheels instead of four. Beyond that, in the next post I’ll ramble on about the state of tech in cars; from over ...

Birgitta Böckeler recently spent some time trying out running local LLMs for some programming tasks. In this memo she outlines the factors that influence how viable they are for the job. more… Birgitta Böckeler recently spent some time trying out running local LLMs for some programming tasks. In this memo she outlines the factors that influence how viable they are for the job. more… Birgitta Böckeler recently spent some time trying out running...

More than 30 years ago, researchers discovered that hypothetical computers based on the laws of quantum physics would be able to rapidly solve difficult math problems. Ever since then, they’ve sought to pinpoint cases where quantum computers are more powerful than their ordinary “classical” cousins. For nearly as long, a small band of computer scientists has pursued a related question that gets… Source More than 30 years ago, researchers discovered that hypothetical computers based on...

I don't know much about dithering. But when I visit other people's sites and they dither their images in cool ways I always wonder how they do it. So in case anyone is wondering, here's my current method for dithering these pink images. Obligatory example image for when I undo this 2 months from now and no one knows wtf I am talking about: Edit: Almost like I know myself to well — the pictures now look like this instead: Which is covered in the post. Read more on the site...

I wrote about the sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 release a couple of weeks ago. Since we only have Claude Fable on our Max subscriptions for a few more days, I decided to see if it could help me get to a 4.0 stable release that I felt truly comfortable about, since I try to keep to SemVer and like my incompatible major versions to be as rare as possible. I started with this prompt, in Claude Code for web on my iPhone: Final review before shipping a stable 4.0 release - very important to spot any ...

The Star Spangled Banner by Percy Moran, via WorldHistory.org . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at households without homeowners insurance, crackdowns on AI chip smuggling, Japan’s two electrical frequencies, Meta’s AI compute business, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber! Housing Someone making the (somewhat dub...

A very strange Pi issue sent me down a rabbit hole over the last two days. The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The edit itself is usually correct but the arguments do not match the schema as the model invents made-up keys and Pi thus rejects the tool call and asks to try again. That alone is not too surprising as models emit malformed tool calls...

The concept of recursive self-improvement (RSI) dates back to I. J. Good (1965) , where he defined an “ultraintelligent machine” as a system that can surpass humans in all intellectual activities and design better machines to improve itself. Yudkowsky (2008) used the phrase “recursive self-improvement” for a specific feedback loop: an AI uses its current intelligence to improve the cognitive machinery that produces its intelligence. This feedback loop in modern AI may indicate the...

CHICAGO (July 1, 2026) — Shield AI, the defense-tech company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, today announced it is an official technology partner of 23XI Racing,  one of the top teams competing in the  NASCAR Cup Series  team .   As part of the partnership, Shield AI and 23XI Racing are integrating Shield AI’s  Hivemind Benchmark , a software analytics tool that collects, processes and visualizes performance data to support driver development...

First two chicks! Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . First two chicks! Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by e...

This is the sixth post in my A-Z Toolbox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical or practical reason. The letter F conjures many words in the English language, many of which don’t express positive emotional states. It’s often invoked prior to mentioning something frustrating, like Flipping Windows Server. That’s regrettable, because there are lots of useful and fun tools. For me it’s an easy win for FFmpeg , the Swiss Army Knife of video and...

I recently read Alan Alda's first memoir  Never have your dog stuffed   which was pretty good. Hence I began looking for more information about him on the web. I came across a YouTube video   At 89, Alan Alda reveals the seven actors he HATED the most .  Gee, in the book he didn't hate anyone. So I was curious what this was about. This could be interesting.  It was not . The title was extremely deceptive. (More than most clickbait?)  Here is the list and what was said about them: Wayne ...

I had another excellent PLDI this past June. It was my fourth 1 . I continued to meet new people and learn new things! Overall: I got to meet a lot of new people, which was exciting. I had some good chats about research. I asked a question at a talk! I got to show Aaron and Jacob PLDI and see them enjoy it. I missed hanging out with CF Bolz-Tereick and Chris Fallin, the usual suspects at conferences I attend. I’m looking forward to next year. This post is more about the conference than...

I finally have time to flesh out ideas for lessons that I’ve wanted for years. However, if I can’t find a way to send them back to 2006, there’s no point writing them: very few people read long-form tutorials about software these days. I’d still be interested in comments, though—figuring out what I would teach always helps me learn. Overview Topic : Error handling. Audience : Senior undergraduates who are comfortable writing programs in Python and JavaScript that are hundred of l...

Go 1.26 rebuilt go fix from scratch. If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a spin: it rewrites the code in your module to use modern language and library features. It has quickly become one of my favorite features, and LLMs are a big part of why. Models tend to use old APIs, and sometimes they deny that a new API exists even when you point them to it. Coaxing a model is non-deterministic. go fix is a better way to keep code on the latest features of the language. Run it locally or in CI a...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Andy Baio, whose blog can be found at waxy.org . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hi, my name’s Andy Baio. I’m a writer and coder liv...